Kuruvilla Pandikattu Joseph, SJ, (कुरुविला पांडिक्काट्ट or കുരുവിള പാണ്ടിക്കാട്ട്) (born November 28, 1957) is an Indian Jesuit priest. He is Chair Professor of JRD Tata Foundation on Business Ethics at XLRI, Jamshedpur and Professor of Philosophy, Science and Religion at Jnana Deepa, Institute of Philosophy and Theology, Pune, Maharashtra, India. He is also Director of JDV Centre for Science-Religion Studies (JCSR) and Association of Science, Society and Religion (ASSR), Pune. He has authored/edited 36 books and written more than 160 academic articles. He is also a co-founder and has been a co-publisher of two journals, Jnanadeepa: Pune Journal of Religious Studies and AUC: Asian Journal of Religious Studies. Furthermore, he has organized more than 40 academic conferences. His weekly column on "Contemporary Spirituality" used to appear on Tuesdays in Financial Chronicle for eight years He has been contributing regularly to both academic and popular journals. He is involved in science-religion dialogue and science-related activities and teaches courses on them as well. His areas of interest (and specialization) include: Science-Religion Dialogue; Philosophical Anthropology (Emerich Coreth); Hermeneutics (Paul Ricœur) and Inter-religious dialogue (Bede Griffiths). Philosophical approach The starting points of Pandikattu's academic research are physics, philosophy (metaphysics) and religion (theology). He became interested in the quest for the unification of the fourfold forces of nature in physics and the hermeneutics of dialogue by Paul Ricoeur. This led him to explore the interpretive and symbolic (or mythic) nature of religious experience and inspired his first doctoral thesis: "Idols to die, so that symbols might live". He traces the idol-symbol tension back to every aspect of human experience. Human Being: Between Before and Beyond Evoking the tensional and paradoxical life of human beings, he holds on to a dynamic and humanistic understanding of the human beings, who transcends their own self-understanding and definitions. Human being is the tensional appropriation between the past and the future, the memory and hope, the actual and the potential. It is in this tensional existence that human beings realis their own ever evolving nature, including that of bound freedom and limited relationship. As bound freedom they are finite beings seeking the infinite. Experiencing limited love, they want to widen the horizon of understanding. Based on the concrete experiences of pleasure they are open to the infinite bliss, that remains open and ever elusive. Thus he concludes that humans are free, to a very limited extent. This limited freedom provides